Hollow Twilight - A LitRPG Novel

Chapter 6

Reid's eyes fluttered open. He was staring up at that orange sky, no clouds to be found anywhere. The darkness sitting beyond it was looking back at him, just behind a thin veil of colour. This was still Hollow Twilight.

He sat up. He was in the same place as before, or at least, he was pretty certain he was. The buildings appeared to be identical but...the monsters were gone. The creatures of darkness had all vanished as far as Reid could see, without a trace. He still felt a light buzzing in his head from the sounds they made but it was fading away with every second.

There was an eerie quiet all around Reid as he sat on the street. There were no natural sounds to this place, no background noise of people talking or moving around, no cars in the streets. Birds didn't chirp, music never played. There was nothing but this silence. Then, the ringing of metal hitting something. Behind Reid.

Reid twisted his neck as he spun the rest of his body to help him get up. A fair distance behind him, there was a person, the shadow of their figure amplified by the orange backdrop. In their hand was an enormous weapon, a scythe the size of their body. Its metal blade would glimmer every so often as it caught a piece of the fading light in the sky.

And beside the person was one of the monsters, the last that Reid could see. It was no longer making any sounds, just advancing on this person. In an instant, the scythe sliced across the creature's body, passing straight through its chest. Light from behind it peeked through the darkness that made up its form before its top half toppled to the ground. And then, the whole thing vanished altogether, like a puff of smoke.

Reid released a long breath. He hadn't realized his breathing had seized when he had caught sight of one of the monsters.

The person ahead of him turned around and started walking towards him. Reid's breath almost stopped all over again in his chest, but he had to reassure himself. This was another player, come to kill the bad guys. Which meant Reid was very lucky they had come by at all, or he would've already lost and faced the penalty of whatever that meant here.

"Aren't you unlucky." The approaching stranger said. Reid could make out it was a man, someone older than him. Probably in university, maybe even older. Or even older than that really, he found it hard to tell with older people just how much older they were. And the man's clothes didn't do anything to help reveal more, just regular jeans that anybody wore, and a coloured t-shirt. He wasn't particularly tall or short, Reid really couldn't figure out where in life this person might be. But he did know he seemed to at least be friendly enough to help him.

"Unlucky? I think I'm incredibly lucky to be saved by you."

"Saved?" The man rubbed the back of his head. He planted his scythe on the ground and leaned against it, his arm lifting just high enough to sit on top of it. "You walked right into my round-up. Sorry about that, I didn't think anyone else would be around."

"Round-up?" Reid glanced to the side. Tricks at the edges of his vision were beginning again, but he was mostly confirming what this person was saying; there was nobody else around. It was a bizarre reminder of the state of this world's emptiness.

"Yeah, Hollows aren't much challenge alone anymore, so I thought I should get a bunch together and kill them all at once. More fun that way, and maybe there's an experience boost or something if you combo."

In this strange place, this foreign world of mystery, Reid felt relief at hearing words that made sense to him. "Oh, you drove them together." Reid stopped to check around again. There were no corpses of the creatures at all. When they dissolved away, they left nothing behind. "I guess that was kind of dumb of me to not be paying attention."